End-weight at its most dynamic

Abstract

This contribution supports and extends the principle of end-weight, first formulated by Quirk et al. (1972) to describe the tendency of heavy constituents to appear late in a sentence. Developing this principle further, we argue that it favours the addition of (functionally non-neutral) morphological markers to sentence-final constituents, which are typically characterized by prosodic prominence. The markers we study are undergoing diachronic establishment or loss and are thus temporarily variable. They represent rather diverse categories in different West Germanic languages and varieties (English, Northern Low German, Frisian) and have been gathered from different periods. Examples include inflectional endings of nouns, adjectives, finite verbs and infinitives, pro-form uses of possessives and the adjective other, prepositional choices, the a-prefix and periphrastic doon ‘do’. We suggest that end-weight is scalar, with absolute sentence-final position producing the strongest effects.